Jamie Obrien C02050043 Mrs. Karen Felts M & W English 099 Human Fear When reading Sebastian Junger’s book War and watching Restrepo, which was the companion film, was quite fearful. Both works talk about Battle Company, 173rd Airborne, and Second Platoon and their deployment to the Korengal Valley and their missions. One particularly mission, Rock Avalanche demonstrated the true fear these men had to go through during their fifteen month deployment. What is fear to us, an everyday person in society is completely different for the men in the valley. We will never experience the feeling of fear of war.
I picked this theme because in the beginning of the story Edmond Dates, a prisoner, is a sad lonely man that wants to die because he has no other prisoner to talk to and he has no hope for getting out of jail. For example in paragraph 9 it says, “Edmond listened, and the sound became more and more distinct.” And then in paragraph
7. The effect of the collapsing time in the final paragraph is that it had really emphasized his terror of remembering the war because even though the war was a huge impact part of his life O’Brien fears the memories of it. The rhetorical effect of this irony is that he spent so much thought over going or not going to war that the memories of the war was given no details whatsoever. It was almost not considered as important as the decision. 8.
What are the effects on Ishmael from being a boy soldier? Well my belief is that he became cold from all the fighting and blood shed he has seen as a boy soldier. In the book, A Long way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael said “Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even thought I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you.
In the novel, ‘Regeneration’ by Pat Barker, the themes of horror and futility are significantly explored. As a result of the horrific events in the war, many soldiers developed psychological problems such as shell shock. In effect, many soldiers such as Siegfried Sassoon reacted against the war and the fact that it was futile, as the motives turned from ‘a war of defence and liberation to a war of aggression and conquest’. In his war poetry, Siegfried Sassoon shows the horrors of war through vivid imagery, and the futility of war, as non combatants such as civilians and generals do not understand what the soldiers experience at the front. In many ways, Barker’s ‘Regeneration’ contrasts with Sassoon’s poetry, due to the fact that the novel is written in the 20th Century, where the characters recount their horrors of war in the safety of Craiglockhart Hospital.
Also with the France, Britain and USA not agreeing on the terms of the treaty made it even harder for it to end. Germany’s anger from the treaty came from a few of conditions which one wasn’t entirely true. The first of these conditions were that they were to blame for the war, this condition so bad that no man in Germany would sign it not even a soldier under direct orders. Also the amount of money that Germany had to pay back was very unrealistic ($6600 million) and would cripple their country for years to come. There were other factors that Germany thought that were very unfair such as their tiny army and the amount of land that was taken from them.
Their way of living should not be respected, but it is true that each of them is somehow struggling with their lives The antagonist and narrator of the story, Jake Barnes, experienced World War I as a soldier. During the war, a number of people were wounded and lost their morality on the battlefields. Jake is one of them who is suffering from the trauma from the war. Jake has an injury from the war and as a result, he is unable to physically make a love to women. This disability left him psychologically and morally lost, and takes his masculinity away from him.
Nothing should be sugar coded because many lives were lost and many individuals suffered a great deal and everyone should understand why. In McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Field” he explains life before and after war. There was once a time when they experience the feeling of love and the enjoyment of life, but now they lay dead looking back at the life they had to give up to fight in war. Those who have died have passed the torch to the next generation of soldiers. This proved that the peace treaty didn’t solve the problem and a new war would occur.
If the Tsar could successfully win the war, he would be able to maintain the support and trust from his people, but unfortunately the Tsar let his people down again. To win the war the Tsar needed to have strong and loyal soldiers, however, the morale of the soldiers was low because over one million soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner by the end of 1914. The army were losing rapidly and there was no evidence of improvement. To make matters worse the soldiers were treated badly on their own side. They were not given shoes and equipment so many men were fighting without guns or shoes, they didn’t have wagons or horses and not even first aid treatment for wounds.
He was concerned that it could inflict lots of harm at great ease, an idea that was reinforced by the atrocities of World War 1 which created destruction that many people had never seen before. Yeats describes, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’, this conveys a universal idea that not only applies to his time but throughout history. The best of people, the intellectuals, do not act upon their beliefs because they ‘lack conviction’ and